We’ve watched the festival stretch farther across EPCOT. We’ve watched its calendar balloon from a relatively short fall event into something that can occupy a substantial portion of the year. We’ve watched Disney add scavenger hunts, cheese crawls, Muppets, elaborate merchandise collections, plant-based marketplaces, and enough pickle-flavored experimentation to make us question where science ends, and chaos begins.

Check inside the passport

And in 2026, the EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival is officially celebrating 30 years. Disney is marking the milestone with 30 returning or reimagined dishes from the festival’s history, along with more than 30 Global Marketplaces and over 100 new menu items. That makes this a pretty good time to look back because the Food & Wine Festival has changed. A LOT. And we’ve eaten through pretty much all of it.

It Started Much Smaller

The EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival debuted in 1996. According to Disney’s own historical records, that first festival lasted about 30 days. Today, Food & Wine feels completely baked into EPCOT’s identity. If you visit in September and there ISN’T a tiny plate of something being served from a temporary kitchen nearby, you might briefly wonder if you entered the wrong park.

Full spread

But the festival was once a much more concentrated fall event built heavily around food, wine, chefs, and culinary education. By the time DFB began covering Food & Wine in 2009, it was already the 14th annual festival. That year’s event ran from September 25th through November 8th and featured more than 25 international marketplaces. Small plates generally cost between $2 and $7. Yes. Two dollars. Please give everyone who remembers those prices a respectful moment to stare silently into the middle distance.

Freshly Baked Chocolate Pudding Cake

There was also a huge emphasis on the “Food AND Wine” part of the name. The 2009 festival promoted hundreds of chefs, culinary demonstrations, wine and beer tastings, signature dinners, seminars, wine schools, food pairings, celebrity chefs, and Party for the Senses. The Festival Welcome Center served as headquarters for demonstrations, book signings, merchandise, wine education, and more. It was still very Disney. But it also felt a little more like a giant culinary convention had temporarily moved into EPCOT. And we miss some of that. More on that in a minute.

Then Food & Wine Started Growing EVERYWHERE

One of the easiest ways to see how Food & Wine has changed is simply to look at the calendar. The original festival lasted around 30 days. In 2014, the 53-day festival was considered record-setting. Three years later, Food & Wine set another record by running for 75 days. That 2017 festival also featured a then-record 35 Marketplace booths.

2017 Food and Wine

Then things got even more dramatic. The 2021 festival ran from July 15th all the way through November 20th (with the heavy possibility that Disney used the popularity of the Food & Wine Festival to get guests back into the parks after the pandemic closure). That is more than four months of Food & Wine, with 32 food booths eventually participating. At that point, “fall festival” was doing some HEAVY lifting.

2021 Food and Wine Festival Passport

Disney has pulled the dates back since then. The 2026 festival runs from August 27th through November 21st, which feels much closer to the modern sweet spot. It’s still long enough that you have multiple chances to visit without Food & Wine beginning while you’re still recovering from your Fourth of July barbecue extravaganza.

Beer flight

The geography changed, too. For years, the marketplaces were closely associated with World Showcase. Then Disney began pushing booths into the former Future World. The 2015 festival was a particularly important turning point. As part of the 20th anniversary, Disney expanded Marketplace booths into Future World, including concepts like Sustainable Chew, Chew Lab, Wine Studio, and Cheese Studio.

Sustainable Chew

Today, finding festival food in World Celebration, World Discovery, and World Nature feels normal. Back then? That was BIG.

The Menus Got More Adventurous

Here’s something else you notice when you spend 17 years digging through festival menus: Food & Wine has become much more comfortable being weird. And we mean that affectionately. The early festivals certainly weren’t boring. In 2010, Disney said approximately 60% of the marketplace menu would be new, and newcomers that year included Belgium and South Korea.

South Korea Booth

But over time, booth concepts became increasingly experimental. In 2012, TERRA debuted as a vegan marketplace, serving items like Trick’n Chick’n Curry and Chili Colorado with cashew cheese. This was more than a decade before plant-based menu markers became common across Disney World menus. In 2013, Scotland arrived with vegetarian haggis, Scottish salmon, Banoffee Tart, Scotch flights, and more.

Haggis with Neeps and Tatties

We’ve subsequently seen booths built around noodles, macaroni and cheese, wings, coastal seafood, cheese, wine, fries, brunch, swanky pigs, and assorted concepts that sound slightly less like nations of the world and slightly more like someone emptied a chef’s notebook onto the conference table.

The Noodle Exchange Booth

Some of the best festival dishes happen when Disney stops playing it safe. And some of the most spectacular disasters happen then, too. That is ALSO useful information. When we tell you a $9 plate isn’t worth your snack budget, we did not arrive at that conclusion through meditation. Someone ate it. Usually several someones.

We Learned That EPCOT Will Make a Game Out of Anything

One of our favorite additions happened in 2015, when Remy’s Ratatouille Hide & Squeak scavenger hunt debuted. Guests could hunt around World Showcase for Remy while collecting stickers on a map, giving kids and non-food-focused members of the group something to do while everyone else argued over whether they should get another order of Canadian Cheddar Cheese Soup.

Remy’s Ratatouille Hide and Squeak Map

Then came cheese. Blessed, wonderful cheese. Emile’s Fromage Montage debuted in 2019 as a cheese crawl. Guests purchased designated cheesy festival dishes, collected stamps in their Festival Passport, and then redeemed the completed challenge for a special treat. It was such a simple idea, and it worked.

Emile’s Fromage Montage 2025

Food strolls gave guests a little mission and encouraged people to try dishes they might otherwise skip. Disney has since used similar stroll concepts across EPCOT festivals, but the Fromage Montage remains one of our favorites because its basic operating principle is essentially, “Would you like an award for eating cheese?” Yes. We would. Thank you for recognizing our sacrifice.

The Muppets Finally Entered the Laboratory

We need to discuss one of the festival’s most important scientific achievements. In 2023, Disney brought Muppet Labs to Brew-Wing at The Odyssey, featuring Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker experimenting with the “flavors of tomorrow and today.” Naturally, this involved things like strangely flavored wings and a Pickle Milkshake. Science is not always pretty.

Brew-Wing 2023 Muppets Lab

The concept stuck around, and Brew-Wing Lab is still operating in 2026 with Bunsen and Beaker, wing “experiments,” the infamous Pickle Milkshake, and one extremely valuable festival feature: AIR-CONDITIONING.

Pickle Milkshake

We would like to formally encourage Disney to continue putting Muppets into Food & Wine wherever physically possible. Give Sam Eagle a booth. Let him stand beside an apple pie and explain that it represents the stoic culinary dignity of the United States of America. We have 30 years of festival history. Surely we have earned this.

2020 Changed Food & Wine in a Big Way

Of course, you cannot talk about how the festival evolved without talking about 2020. Disney World reopened after its pandemic closure on July 15th, 2020, and EPCOT reopened with a modified Taste of EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival. That version was considerably pared down from the festivals we had known. There were more than 20 booths, including some elements carried over from the abbreviated Flower & Garden Festival, but many of Food & Wine’s traditional events and entertainment offerings were missing.

2020 Food and Wine Festival

The 2021 festival remained modified. The marketplaces were the main attraction, while much of the large-scale culinary programming that had defined earlier years still had not returned. Eventually, Eat to the Beat came back. More entertainment returned. The festival continued rebuilding. But some things never really did. And those are the changes we notice most because we remember what used to fill those spaces.

We Still Miss the Old Festival Center

If we could pull one major element out of Food & Wine history and plop it into modern EPCOT, the Festival Center would be very high on the list. For years, the former Wonders of Life pavilion acted as Food & Wine headquarters. You could go inside for culinary demonstrations, beverage seminars, book signings, merchandise, festival information, food and drinks at Intermissions Cafe, educational programming, and various special events. The 2015 version alone included multiple stage areas, shops, seminars, and gathering spaces.

The Festival Center

It made Food & Wine feel like an EVENT. In 2019, the building closed as part of EPCOT’s massive transformation, and festival activities became more scattered. Events and merchandise suddenly felt much more spread out, with World ShowPlace eventually taking over some Festival Center functions.

Cheese Seminar in 2015

We are very happy EPCOT now has CommuniCore Hall, which opened to festival use beginning in 2024. Disney has continued experimenting with ways to use that space, including the 2026 “Cheers to Cheese!” experience beginning later this festival season. But we still want MORE. Give us classes. Tastings. Guest chefs. Weirdly specific seminars about cheese. Teach us something about wine that we will confidently repeat at dinner and then immediately forget.

CommuniCore Hall “Sunlight to Starbright” Exhibit

Food & Wine once had a much stronger educational component, and we would love to see Disney reclaim that part of the festival’s personality.

And Please Bring Back the Big Special Events

This is probably the single biggest thing longtime Food & Wine visitors notice. There used to be SO MANY special events. There were culinary demonstrations, beverage seminars, food and wine pairings, cheese seminars, celebrity chef appearances, signature meals, brunches, mixology sessions, workshops, and highly specialized events covering particular cuisines or drinks. In 2015 alone, you could find events devoted to French family meals, Japanese craft beer, Manhattans, wines from 1996, artisan cheeses, celebrity chefs, and much more.

Artisanal Cheese Trio for the Cheese Studio

And then there was Party for the Senses. The big-ticket event at World ShowPlace brought together chefs, tasting stations, wine, beer, and entertainment. In some years, DFB experienced more than 50 tasting stations at these parties. The last Party for the Senses was offered in 2019.

Food and Wine Festival Center

We understand why the modern festival leans so heavily on marketplaces. They’re accessible. You don’t need reservations months in advance. Guests can spend as much or as little as they want. But Food & Wine lost some depth when the culinary demonstrations and special events disappeared. We would happily trade one piece of commemorative festival merchandise for a cheese seminar. Maybe two pieces. We are negotiable.

Thirty Years Later, Disney Is Looking Back Too

Which brings us to 2026. For the festival’s 30-year celebration, Disney has gone digging through the archives, too. There are 30 anniversary dishes representing the festival’s past, either returning outright or reimagined for the modern event. The Festival Passport even highlights these legacy foods and identifies the decades they came from.

Passport time!

That is exactly the kind of anniversary celebration we want from Food & Wine. Because one of the great things about covering this event for so long is that food becomes a timestamp. We remember when Hawaii was the new booth. We remember when Scotland debuted. We remember when putting festival kitchens in Future World seemed unusual. We remember the first Fromage Montage. We remember the year Food & Wine opened in JULY.

SPAM Sushi

We remember culinary demonstrations in the Festival Center, packed Party for the Senses events, Muppet experiments, beloved dishes disappearing, terrible dishes inexplicably surviving, and returning favorites that we would notice missing approximately four seconds after Disney released a menu. And we have the photos, menus, reviews, and festival guides to prove it.

Rose Bottom of Cote des Rose

That history gives context when we review something. When we say a returning dish changed, we usually have an old photo. When we tell you a booth has been inconsistent, we have eaten there in more than one year. When we say an item is one of the best things we’ve had at Food & Wine, it is competing against a VERY crowded field. And when something costs more, tastes different, has gotten smaller, improved dramatically, or somehow survived another season despite our continued objections, we notice.

We’ll Keep Eating. For Research.

Food & Wine today is very different from the festival Disney launched 30 years ago. It’s bigger. Longer. More casual. More family-friendly. More experimental. There are scavenger hunts and cheese crawls and Muppet laboratories alongside the international marketplaces that started the whole thing. Some changes have made Food & Wine substantially better. Others left holes we’d still like Disney to fill.

Festival Cast Members

We want the weird booths. We want more international flavors. We want Bunsen and Beaker conducting deeply irresponsible culinary experiments. But we also want some of that old Food & Wine energy back. Bring us the chefs. Bring us the demonstrations. Give CommuniCore Hall a packed schedule of tastings and seminars. And if Party for the Senses suddenly appears on next year’s calendar, you will hear us screaming from wherever you happen to be standing.

The Canada Booth Spread

30 years is a long time for any Disney event to survive, much less grow into one of EPCOT’s defining traditions. And after covering it since 2009, we can say one thing with confidence. The festival is going to change again. We’ll be there when it does. Probably holding six forks, three cameras, a Festival Passport, and a suspiciously warm tray of cheese. For research.